pervision of the boys' lessons in the adjoining room, went back to the
book-littered table unnoticed. This frontier Darby and Joan, whose tin
wedding had passed and gone long months before, seemed spooning yet.
It's another "way we have in the army," and long may it live and linger.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Long remembered at the agency and among the lodges of the assembled
Sioux was the morning of the arrival of Lieutenant Davies with a squad
of half-frozen troopers at his back. The gale that swept the prairies on
Wednesday had died away. The mercury in the tubes at the trader's store
had sunk to the nethermost depths. The sundogs blazed in the eastern
sky, and even the rapids of the Running Water seemed turned to solid
blue. Borne on the wings of the blast, straight from the frozen pole,
the Ice King had swooped upon the sheltered valley. Cold as is the wide
frontier at such times, even among the gray heads, the old medicine-men,
the great-grandmothers of the tribes, huddling in the frowzy,
foul-smelling tepees, were legends of no such bitter, biting cold as
this. Cattle lying here and there stark and stiffened, hardy ponies,
long used to Dakota blizzards, even some among the Indian dogs had
succumbed to its severity, while over at the agent's, behind
double-listed doors and frost-covered sashes, around roaring coal fires
in red-hot stoves, the employes and their families herded together
almost as did the Indians, execrating the drop in the temperature one
minute even while thanking God for it the next. It was the main thing
that had interposed to save them from the vengeance of Red Dog's band.

All through the desperate battling of the previous summer, even in the
face of fiercest triumph the Indians had known in years, one little band
of Sioux had kept faith with the white brother and refused all effort to
draw its young men to the war-path. For months, from early spring-tide,
against three columns of regular troops, the hostiles in the Big Horn
and Powder River countries had more than held their own, and under the
spell of Sitting Bull and led by such war chiefs as Crazy Horse and Gall
and Rain-in-the-Face, the turbulent spirits of nearly every tribe had
swelled the fighting force until at times six thousand warriors were in
the field engaged in bloody work. The whole Sioux nation seemed in arms.
Ogallalla and Brule, Minneconjou, Uncapapa, Teton and Santee, Sans Arc
and Black Foot, leagued with their only rivals i